As we consider the worst fast-food offering ever, let us begin with the artifact itself: KFC's new Famous Bowls product consists of a plastic tub of mashed potatoes or rice, topped with yellow corn, fried chicken nuggets,
gravy and three varieties of grated cheese. All in one container, all to be consumed as a single homogenous mass, spork after spork of undifferentiated food matter.
And there it sits on my desk, a steaming, sweating pound of food goo that I purchased at a drive-in window (more anonymous that way) for $3.99. Let me tell you, it's one thing to muse upon the Famous Bowls in a detached, ne'er-shall-pass-my-lips sort of way. Quite another to address the product, spork in hand.
And now, in the interests of participatory journalism, I take a bite. Hmmm. Uh-huh. OK. It's like throwing up in reverse.
The French culinary aesthete Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin reminded us that food is culture, and so we have to wonder what he would say about the Famous Bowls and life in this America. The French, after all, knew something about revolting peasants.
Even in a nation that has made the bulk fast-food bolus something of a culinary art, KFC's Famous Bowls are somehow splendidly, transcendently awful. Perhaps it's because, if you retain any of your childhood aversion to foods touching, the Famous Bowls will send you shrieking into traffic. Perhaps it's because it so brazenly exposes its own purpose: to economically pack the gullets of the poor. Gone is even the pretense that someone might eat this for its taste. This is gerbil food for the disenfranchised. One KFC marketing exec, in a moment of linguistic clarity I'll bet he wishes he had back, is quoted as saying the meals are directed at "heavy fast-food users." Never was the connection between fast food and addictive drugs made more explicit.
The Famous Bowls, according to KFC, are designed to lure more lunchtime customers with a meal that has all the goodness of KFC's popular dishes--like gravy--in one convenient, portable, easy-to-inhale serving. And thus the gustatory equivalent of composting.
A couple of questions immediately present themselves: Why not go all the way and top the Famous Bowls with an apple pie and pour Coca-Cola over them? To save customers the struggle to pocket their change at the drive-thru, why not throw it on top as well? If the product developers thought Famous Bowls were a good idea, I have two words for them: chicken smoothie.
